Featured Artist | Lizzie Mackay

We're so happy to have been able to include items designed by Lizzie Mackay in our kits, most recently in the Cirque Project Life® and Card kits. Lizzie is a designer and illustrator living in England, and her original woodland characters,

I’ve been working with Studio Calico for about 6 months now. I was so excited to be asked to do some stamps for them at the beginning. It’s definitely a little dream come true for me.

Can you tell us about your creative process? What mediums do you work with, what inspires you?

I always start with a little seed of an idea which can come from anything from an interesting combo of colors, a flower in the garden, our rabbits, a cool interior on Instagram.. anywhere really. I then draw, scan, draw, scan some more and then finally play on the computer, piecing bits together with pattern and color. Sort of like scrapbooking, but on the screen. I get really excited by upcoming trends, I like to keep things moving and changing.

Would you mind giving us a peek into your creative space?

It's currently a work in progress! We're waiting for the elusive "spare time" to convert a room looking onto our garden into a dream space for me. I have a vision of how I want it to be…we just have to do it! In the meantime, I have a room off the hallway. It’s lovely to be in the hub of the house with the children and daily mayhem, but sometimes dangerously distracting when I should be cooking dinner and wander past my work. We rarely eat on time!

We’d love to see more of your art! Could you share a couple of your favorite projects?

The past year has been amazing and non-stop. I’ve been so lucky to work in new areas of design like kid’s interiors for Lilipinso, fabric collections for Blend, and The Woodland Poster Book for Bowie Style among many others. I’m also about to start working on some children’s books. I keep thinking I’ve dreamt that one up!

Where can we find more of your work?

By the end of this year, I’m dying to make a few of my own products which will be available online. Now that I’ve written it down here, I have to do it… no more procrastinating, right!? You can follow me on Instagram or see my website for examples of more of my work, and keep an eye out for my designs here on Studio Calico in the meantime too.